Bolivian navy

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags
by Tim Marshall
Published 21 Sep 2016

This features an array of weapons, a condor at the top, and what looks to the untrained eye like a llama in the centre, but is in fact an alpaca, which, as everyone knows, is considerably smaller than a llama. Perhaps of more interest, other than the alpaca, are two other flags flown in Bolivia. The first is that of the Bolivian navy – not so much because of its design, but because the navy operates at 12,000 feet up in the Andes in landlocked Bolivia and most of the sailors have never seen the sea. This is due to the 1884 treaty signed to end the War of the Pacific, in which Bolivia ceded 240 miles of coastline to Chile and thus lost access to the ocean.

Better Than Fiction
by Lonely Planet

Neither of these happens to be on my list, although both might be, if I had the time. My list, like many such things, features odd places that bear no real relation to one another, but that have for some reason caught my imagination. I would like to get to Bolivia some day to speak to people about the Bolivian navy. Why? Bolivia is a landlocked country and it interests me that a country that has no access to the sea (they lost that a long time ago) should feel so strongly about having a navy. The fact that one has no sea should not inhibit one unduly, of course: they have a lake and that’s enough of an excuse to have a large number of admirals – and an immensely popular Navy Day.